Did a dum dum-deleted partition accidently

Hi all,

I was installing a motherboard in a friend's computer, and I was doing the hdd reformat that was part of the job. Unknown to me, I had accidently plugged in his usb external hdd, which was not to be messed with. He had backed up all his important stuff onto that. Well, when I got to the part of the xp install routine where you select where to install the new OS, I deleted all partitions I found, thinking they were on the physical drive in the machine. What actually happened was it was seeing 2 partitions on the usb drive I didn't know was connected to the machine. I think the chances of a full recovery are excellent, because I only deleted the partitions. I did not format them, nor were they used later for anything else. Am I correct in thinking they'll be fairly easy to recover?

Last but not least, I'd like to recover them for free if possible. Are there any free programs out there that can do this?

There are freeware utilities that can recover the info.A bump might help someone chime in with a good one.

You can try a Knoppix CD to boot and recover the files.

http://www.knoppix.org/

PC Inspector has recovery options and is freeware. Runs in Windows.

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

If these don't work, I'd recommend R-Studio as the best balance of features and performance. You can download their trial version to ensure that the files will be recoverable. Runs in Windows.

http://r-tt.com/